


Sheltering skies and stable earth beneath

by maharetr



Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic)
Genre: Don't Ask Don't Tell, M/M, Military, Team Haiku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 04:58:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/474772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharetr/pseuds/maharetr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cougar’s silence seeps into his bones,<br/>settles him, grounds him.<br/>It inserts consciousness between brain and mouth,<br/>teaches him stillness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sheltering skies and stable earth beneath

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Meghanc for the eternal, patient handholding, and for going above and beyond the call of duty to beta this one <3\. Thank you Lady_Krysis for the phenomenal art and the encouraging emails, and to Kate for the soul-soothing podfic. See the links to their awesome work at the end of the fic.
> 
> Title from the Mountain Goats' song 'Never Quite Free'.

Operation Foothold  
is flies and dust and glaring sunlight,  
hot nights and mosquito nets that don’t do much.

Jensen breaks into CCTV feeds,  
hacks his way into databases,  
and runs Minecraft in the background to relieve the tedium.

Day seventeen  
an IED blasts their shelter  
sweeps Jensen off his feet, and  
drops him, just as abruptly.

Operation Foothold  
is a red haze of agony,  
Clay screaming for medics

and Cougar chanting  
low and threateningly,  
Prayers like orders.

“ _Dios te salve, María, llena eres de_ \--  
don’t you dare die on us, you fucker -- _llena eres de…_ ”

The words follow Jensen  
down into the dark.

~*~

He was lucky, say the medics,  
that he didn’t lose the leg.  
That Cougar was there  
holding Jensen’s thigh together  
with his belt and his bare hands.

~*~

 

Lucky, but his leg still hurts like fuck,  
stitches biting teeth-like into his flesh.

His apartment suddenly feels much too big  
when he has to use crutches to get to the bathroom

and much too small, closing in around him,  
now that he can’t get up and leave any time he feels like it.

He hates sitting trapped in his apartment’s silence,  
but what comes out of his mouth is:  
“I’m fine, I got this. Leave me alone.”

 

Cougar turns up anyway  
bringing take-out, bad movies, silence.  
It’s impossible to argue with someone who won’t argue back.

Jensen tries.  
He argues enough for both of them  
while Cougar unpacks food.

Jensen’s only half way through his rant on privacy invasion  
when Cougar thrusts meds under his nose,  
and glares him into silence. 

He takes his pills.

~*~

The pain pills sink in  
loosen his muscles,  
loosen his mind.

He rests his head against Cougar’s shoulder;  
snarks absently at the screen.

Cougar’s every chuckle  
rumbles against Jensen,  
radiates into him as little shivers.  
He doesn’t know what to think about that.

He would think about it, if the pills weren’t making him fuzzy.  
Or maybe he wouldn’t;  
This isn’t college. This is the military.  
The rules are different here. There are rules here.

So Jensen waves his hands,  
point-making, sleepily,  
but keeps them to himself. 

The credits roll  
and moving is too fucking hard;  
Jensen feigns sleep.

But Cougar is the master of stillness.  
He knows.  
“Here.” He’s smiling. “I’ll help.”

Getting vertical requires teamwork,  
but with Jensen’s arm around Cougar’s shoulder,  
and Cougar’s arm around Jensen’s waist,  
they manage.

Standing tight together,  
one leg off the ground,  
is more balanced than Jensen’s felt for days.

Jensen’s hand wanders  
all on its own,  
pats Cougar’s chest.

“You make the best crutch,”  
Jensen’s mouth says.  
“They should market you. You’re pretty.”

His hand hasn’t moved.  
Cougar’s heartbeat is strong,  
steady against his palm.

“Good with the ladies?” Cougar offers.  
“Something like that,” Jensen says,  
and makes himself shut up.

~*~

 

He wakes warm under the covers,  
morning pills and water on the nightstand, crutches within reach,  
and leftover takeout, breakfast of champions, in the fridge.

Everything in order.  
Except the house is _empty_  
the silence is all wrong. 

~*~

The days settle into a familiar rhythm:  
The team comes around and Jensen whines  
of boredom, and the fucking _itching_ ,  
and begs for code to fix.

The nights settle into a familiar rhythm, too.  
Cougar-quiet is a sound all of its own.  
It settles Jensen’s mind, makes it easier to sleep.

The nightmares kick in two days later;  
this is how he finds out that Cougar stays.

It’s choking smoke, hard gravel under him,  
blood and agony, and Cougar shouting, crushing him.

Then Jensen wakes and it’s leg pain,  
and Cougar pinning him,  
whispering: “it’s okay, I’ve got you…”  
soothing Jensen’s terror.

The routine doesn’t shift: it’s still food, pills, bad movies.  
But now Jensen lies in bed,  
knowing that Cougar is stretched out on the couch.

If that stops the dreams,  
neither of them mention it.  
Sometimes it doesn’t.

Once, once it’s Cougs down,  
dying bloody, badly,  
and Jensen wakes shouting

Cougs, alive and warm,  
cradling him, whispering  
“ _Mi amor_ , shhh, wake up.”  
and Jensen –

should rear back, punch him  
should twist away, panicking  
should shove Cougs away…

\-- presses his face into Cougar’s neck,  
entwines their legs and clings tight.  
“ _Está bien, te tengo a ti_ ,” Cougar murmurs  
and if Jensen’s face is wet,  
Cougar is kind enough not to mention it.

They never talk about Jensen waking shouting Cougar’s name.  
Or waking in each other’s arms the next morning  
but it’s the best damn sleep Jensen’s had in ... months.

~*~

Finally free of stitches and crutches,  
cleared for light duty,  
Jensen swaps the tedium of his apartment  
for the tedium of office paperwork.

More space,  
more ability to move, at last,  
but he’s still faintly antsy.

Cougar gets it.  
He signs out two sidearms,  
takes Jensen to the range with a tiny smile.

Having solid metal in his hands,  
the smell of the gun oil,  
the impact of the recoil,  
settles something inside him.

If Jensen stands too close,  
watching Cougar’s stance, the lines of his body  
as he fires shot after shot

If Cougar comes up behind him,  
touches Jensen’s shoulders,  
adjusts the angle of his arms,  
nudges his legs apart,

Well, clearly weeks out of commission have made him rusty.

They take turns in the lane for over an hour.  
Somewhere in there,  
Jensen realizes he hasn’t said a word.

~*~

That night,  
the knock at his apartment door  
isn’t a surprise at all.

Cougar still brings food  
and they eat, mostly in silence,  
because Jensen has questions, half a breath away,  
and he’s pretty sure he’s not allowed to ask.

Cougar breaks the silence:  
“How’s the leg?”

Answering a question with a question isn’t answering at all.  
Jensen grins, to make it a joke if Cougar wants:  
“Wanna see?”

Cougar’s little smirk is all the answer Jensen needs.  
He leads the way to the bedroom.

~*~

No one’s asked anything,  
no one’s told anything,  
and that makes it totally okay  
that Jensen is standing in a shirt and boxers,  
Cougar scrutinising the scar tissue twisting across Jensen’s thigh  
with an almost professional air.

He _kneels_ in front of Jensen  
as if he wants the vantage point,  
nodding approvingly at the surgeon’s work,  
as if he’s not noticing Jensen’s goddamn erection.

Cougar looks up from under his lashes,  
his tongue flicking over his lower lip,  
but all he asks is: “does it hurt still?”

Jensen’s brain takes a moment to catch up.  
“Aches.” He manages a little venom in there.

Cougar chuckles, low in his throat.  
“Need a hand there?” he asks.  
“If you’re offering,” Jensen responds, too quickly,  
not sure what he’s doing,  
or if they should be doing it at all.

Jensen is utterly off-balance, again,  
but Cougar’s hands are there,  
steadying  
even if they’re just pulling down his boxers,  
pushing him back towards the bed.

Jensen half-trips, sits down hard,  
and Cougar is there, nudging Jensen’s knees apart,  
running his hands up Jensen’s thighs,  
over the scars and up, leaning in.

For a guy who doesn’t talk much, he sure knows how to use his mouth.

Post-orgasm, standing is out of the question.  
Jensen falls back onto the bed,  
manages to coordinate legs enough  
to get all of him onto the mattress.

Cougar stretches out beside him,  
and Jensen fumbles, barely-coordinated, for Cougar’s crotch,  
wanting to touch, to take Cougar apart in return.

Cougar demonstrates,  
motion, movement, pressure,  
his hand wrapped warm around Jensen’s  
like they’re at the range,  
but so much better.

Jensen starts slow, because it’s all he can manage,  
until Cougar starts _murmuring_ , under his breath,  
Spanish and English, pleas for more.  
So Jensen _keeps_ it slow,  
until Cougar is incoherent: lips moving, eyes closed, head tipped back,  
and it’s possibly the most gorgeous thing Jensen’s ever seen. 

After,  
When their breathing has settled,  
When Cougar covers his eyes with his forearm, in lieu of his hat  
Jensen reaches across and touches the crucifix resting on Cougar’s chest,  
brushes his thumb over the metal tangled with Cougar’s dogtags.

“I don’t want to be fucking with your immortal soul,  
or anything,” Jensen says, eventually.

Cougar entwines their fingers,  
closes their hands around the cross,  
is silent for a beat.

It’s somehow the most intimate thing they’ve done so far.

“I do not believe,” he says, quietly, consideringly,  
“that God makes mistakes. I do not believe –”  
he runs his free hand over Jensen’s thigh, along the scars.  
“—that caring for people, loving people, is wrong.”

Jensen considers that.  
Hears the tension under Cougars words,  
of all the people who’ve disagreed.  
“Okay,” he says. “I can work with that.

“I… don’t want to be fucking with the team dynamics, either.”  
The silence is longer this time.  
“That I don’t know,” Cougar admits. “But we can take care.”

Jensen doesn’t know what “care” looks like here,  
but he can imagine enough to nod.  
“Okay. Let’s work with that.”

~*~

Working with that, it turns out,  
is straightforward enough.

When they run missions  
Jensen shares a tent with Pooch,

At the end of the more horrible days  
when the only way Jensen can process is by babbling,  
Cougar hangs back,  
out of Jensen’s immediate sightline,  
out of his immediate topic range.

It helps.  
Having Cougar close behind helps even more than the talking.

Being within Cougar’s reach,  
 _knowing_ that Cougar is behind his right shoulder,  
or is hidden up high, tracking threats in his crosshairs,  
has unexpected side effects.

Cougar’s silence seeps into his bones,  
settles him, grounds him.  
It inserts consciousness between brain and mouth,  
teaches him stillness.

It helps.  
Still, they are careful.

~*~

Dingy safe-house kitchen,  
ohgod-hundred hours,  
Jensen makes coffee.

He’s bruised and sore from a night of trying to outrun bad intel,  
exhausted by comms failure, fatigued by fear.

Cougar stumbles in, half-awake, half-dressed,  
lured by the smell of coffee,  
and Jensen catalogues the scrape down Cougar’s side,  
the discoloring bruising.

Jensen starts to move aside,  
give Cougar access to the machine,  
but Cougar is faster.

He wraps one arm tight around Jensen’s waist  
presses his face into Jensen’s shoulder,  
holds him close.

They shouldn’t, this is _dangerous_.  
But the house is quiet  
and Jensen leans back into Cougar’s embrace,  
covers Cougar’s arm with his own  
tangles their fingers, breathing deep Cougar’s smell,  
of the relief of being _alive_ still.

“Oh, man. I’m officially disgusted.”  
Roque’s in the doorway, eyebrows raised.  
“I am officially disgusted by you both.”

Jensen’s still exhaustedly processing,  
but Cougar’s already gone from embracing to shielding  
with the tiniest shift of his weight,  
and Jensen would make time for being pissed about that  
but Pooch is there, too, behind Roque’s shoulder.

And Jensen slides back into adrenaline,  
because all of this could be very, very bad.

“Toldya.” Pooch is grinning.  
And Roque is going for his pocket, but it’s just his wallet he’s drawing,  
handing Pooch a fifty, pointing accusingly at them both.

“Y’all _owe_ me. You cost me _money_.”

Pooch is bumping past Roque into the kitchen,  
relaxed and easy. Roque is scowling,  
but that’s a familiar, comforting glare.

Jensen glances between the two of them,  
and draws in a deep, steadying breath.  
“Yeah,” he says. “We owe you both.”

~*~

Clay is more serious.  
He pulls them aside after mission debrief.  
“I hear rumours,” he says,  
“that there’s betting going on between my men.

“You realise that’s a misconduct charge,  
and that involves me doing paperwork.”

Jensen’s heart has tripped, but Cougar is there,  
at his right shoulder. Steading him.

Jensen plasters on a grin.  
“We’d never willingly force you to do paperwork, sir.”

Clay glances between the two of them.  
“See that you don’t.”

“Also,” his voice is quieter. “Unrelated to paperwork.  
Don’t give anyone reason to give you shit, and I won’t have to ask, see?”

“Yessir,” murmured reflexively, in unison.

“But if they do, let us know. That _is_ an order.”

“We can look after ourselves,” Cougar says,  
utterly deferential in a way that Jensen’s never mastered.

“Of course you can,” Clay says.  
“But what sort of teammates  
deny us an opportunity for righteous asskicking?”

The smile pulling at Jensen’s mouth feels almost real.  
He bites it down into a serious “Yessir.”  
And Clay dismisses them with a grunt and a wave,  
out into the sunlight and US soil  
and two glorious weeks of leave.

~*~

They lose fifty apiece to Roque next poker game,  
because that’s a debt that should be returned with interest.  
They find a particularly bizarre bobbleheaded puppy for Pooch,  
who laughs his ass off and all but superglues it to their newest vehicle.  
They never, ever give Clay – or anyone else – a reason to ask.

~*~

In Jensen’s memory, it fractures into freeze-frames:  
the kids  
the copter  
the missile  
Cougar kneeling over the wreckage, praying.  
The cold, helpless horror spreading through Jensen’s body.

Real-time kicks back in as they’re limping out,  
and the realization that burned flesh  
isn’t just seared into memory, its Cougar’s _arm_.

Clay calls a halt at the next creek they come across.  
Jensen braces for a fight, for forcing Cougar into the stream.

The arm is bad, but the unresisting flop into the water is worse.

Jensen babbles, soft, for Cougar’s ears alone.  
“Not your fucking fault, man,  
don’t you dare try carry this.”

Cougar shuts his eyes  
shutting out the world,  
shutting out _Jensen_.

Jensen hauls Cougar upright,  
forces Cougar’s good arm around his shoulders.  
“We are not leaving you, you asshole.”

It feels like miles before Cougar starts taking his own weight.

~*~

They stagger into civilisation  
exhausted, ID-less, cashless.

 _We’re not soldiers anymore_ , Roque had said,  
and it’s true.

Fear sits heavy in Jensen’s gut,  
fear of never getting home,  
of never seeing Jen and Beth again,  
but he’s so fucking grateful, too.

Not being Army means he can blatantly spend the night in Cougar’s room.  
Spill tech over every available surface between Cougar’s bed and the door.  
Cover _Cougar_ , for once. Provide a lullaby of endless background typing.

He shamelessly wheedles Cougar into eating,  
manhandles Cougar out of bed each morning,  
and hones his emotional blackmail skills to get Cougar into bed each night.

“He sleeping much?” Clay wants to know.  
and that sums it up, that they’re coming to him about Cougar.  
Jensen nods. “Some.”

He’s learned the twitches of an impending nightmare,  
how to get in close under Cougar’s defenses and talk him awake  
and hold onto him through the first few horrible conscious minutes.

“Are _you_ sleeping much?” Pooch asks.  
Jensen shrugs. “Enough.”

When the emotional blackmail fails  
Jensen can go to his knees,  
turn off Cougar’s higher thinking,  
reduce their world to  
 _right there_  
 _No deje de_  
and fuck Cougar into a deep, dreamless sleep.

They ride out a month like that.  
Rocky, hard, and, Jensen fears, unchanging.

But one night  
somewhere in month two  
Cougar sleeps, breathing deep and slow.  
One hour, two… four; Jensen typing steadily  
not wanting to break the spell.

Until dawn glows through thin curtains,  
and Cougar wakes slow and easy, looks over at Jensen,  
and his expression is almost, almost a smile.

~*~

Things are still shit.  
They’re still KIA, on the wrong side of the border,  
thousands of miles from family and home,  
and even longer than that from tracking down Max,

but in the tiny corner of the world that Jensen can control,  
Cougar’s coming back, one shoulder bump, arched eyebrow, and tiny smirk at time.

And when Jensen works late,  
trying not to think about Jen, or Beth;  
it’s Cougar’s turn to haul him off to bed  
and “encourage” him to sleep.

It keeps things bearable. More than bearable.

~*~

Jensen tracks the news sites,  
ostensibly Max-searching,  
but politics creep in, too.

You can take the man out of the Army,  
but you can’t take the Army out of the man.

He keeps an eye on the debate.  
snorts at the talk of unit cohesiveness, tradition, _showering_.

Even so, Jensen is barely aware of the passing hours on September 19, 2011.  
hunched over his laptop on their bed, tracking money trails and leads.

He hears Cougar come in, scoots over reflexively without looking up.  
The beer bottles get his attention.

“Midnight,” Cougar shrugs,  
“Somewhere in the US.”  
and he chinks their bottles together  
like it’s no big deal, but it kinda is.

Jensen considers the cold beer, and goes for kissing Cougar instead.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sheltering skies and stable earth beneath: Several Illustrations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/488619) by [lady_krysis (saekhwa)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saekhwa/pseuds/lady_krysis)
  * [Sheltering skies and stable earth beneath [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/499193) by [kisahawklin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin)




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